Orders from Berlin Page A

a bar. Everything was silent – the killer was long gone. That much was obvious.
    ‘What can you see?’ asked Quaid, coming up behind Trave as he was examining the outside of the door frame.
    ‘Whoever it is got out this way—’
    ‘I know that.’
    ‘But I don’t think this is how he got in,’ said Trave, finishing his sentence.
    ‘Why do you say that?’
    ‘There are no signs of forcible entry, and the key’s in the door,’ said Trave, pointing. ‘And I don’t think the killer put it there.’
    ‘Why not?’
    ‘I just don’t see him going round the flat looking for it when he knew someone had seen him. He’d have been too desperate to get away.’
    ‘Maybe he knew where to look,’ said Quaid. ‘He certainly knew where to find the fire escape.’
    ‘Yes, but I don’t think that means he’s been here before,’ said Trave. ‘Most of these Victorian apartment blocks have fire escapes like this at the back.’
    ‘Well, aren’t you the expert?’ said Quaid sarcastically. And then apologized immediately when he saw how Trave recoiled, obviously offended. He hadn’t had Trave working for him that long, but there’d already been several cases where his assistant had noticed something that seemed minor at the time but turned out afterwards to be important. Quaid was an arrogant man, but he was clever enough to realize that two sets of eyes were better than one. After all, what did it matter who saw what, provided Quaid got the credit for solving the case afterwards. ‘Come on, William, have a sense of humour,’ he said, clapping Trave on the back. ‘I expect you’re right. Our dead friend probably had the door locked – unless he was too busy with his books and got absent-minded, which is always a possibility. Have you seen how many he’s got? The flat’s stuffed to the rafters with them. Come and take a look.’
    Trave followed Quaid back down the corridor to the living room. The inspector was right. Books were everywhere, lined up horizontal and vertical on overloaded shelves or piled in precarious leaning towers on tables and chairs. From a side table over by the window, Trave picked up a copy of Hitler’s
Mein Kampf
in the original German that had been heavily annotated in blue ink; lying underneath it was a copy of
The Communist Manifesto,
this time in translation.
    There were papers too, all covered with the same distinctive spidery handwriting, and yellowing articles cut out of newspapers. There didn’t seem to be any surface in the flat that wasn’t covered in some way.
    ‘Christ, he’s got more books than the bloody public library,’ said Quaid, whistling through his teeth. ‘You’d need a compass to find your way round here.’
    ‘No, I think that he knew where everything was. Or almost everything,’ Trave said meditatively. It was almost as if he were speaking to himself.
    ‘So you think there’s method in the madness, eh, William?’ Quaid observed, eyeing his assistant with interest and glancing back round the jam-packed room.
    ‘I had an uncle who lost one of his legs in the last war,’ said Trave. ‘He didn’t do anything except read.’
    ‘Like you,’ said Quaid with a smile.
    ‘Worse. His house was just like this, and yet when he wanted to show me something in one of his books, he could lay his hands on it in a minute.’
    ‘Well, good for him,’ said Quaid. ‘But why did you say “almost everything”? What was that about?’
    ‘I’m not sure. Maybe it’s nothing. It’s just these papers on the floor here, they’re different somehow,’ said Trave, pointing to a small heap of documents near his feet that were lying on the carpet in the space between the desk and the fireplace.
    ‘In what way different?’
    ‘They look like they’ve been thrown there, maybe from off the desk. They’re not stacked up like the other papers.’
    ‘Yes, maybe you’re right,’ said Quaid, looking down. ‘Good work, William. You’ll make a decent detective yet.